Many times musicians and/or vocalists desire to collaborate to form a musical work without the need for assembling all musicians/vocalists in a recording studio. Thus, the audio signal from different musical instruments, vocalists and/or other audio sources can be recorded individually at a location, then later mixed together to form a composite musical work, and then sent back to the musicians/vocalists. However, such activity cannot be performed in real time, and multiple musicians and/or vocalists wishing to collaborate in real rime from multiple locations cannot do so.
There are, however, conference call systems which allow multiple users wishing to make a conference call to do so without the use of an operator or a bridge number. However, such conference call devices do not allow multiple musicians/vocalists to collaborate in real time from multiple locations to form a composite work which each musician/vocalist can hear at the same time. Musicians/Vocalists attempting to collaborate by a conference call are also severely limited by the audio constraints of the telephone system, which typically does not pass any audio signals above 3000-4000 hertz, thereby providing a significant limitation on audio quality.
In an effort to more quickly form composite musical works, program servers have been developed which interface with the Internet and allow multiple musicians at different locations to use the Internet to send a MIDI audio streams over the Internet to the server, which mixes the audio sources using an MIDI merge function and feeds the merged MIDI signal back to participating musicians. However, this system, too, does not operate in real time, and cannot provide feedback to the musicians/vocalists while they are playing their instruments and/or singing their vocal part.
What is needed is a method and apparatus which can allow multiple musicians/vocalists at various locations to easily collaborate on a musical work and which provides near real time feedback of the collaborative work at the multiple locations at which the musicians/vocalists are located. What is also needed is a simplified high fidelity conference call system which does not require operator interaction to establish a conference connection.